Who’s fair dinkum?

To truncate a quote from Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns, there are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns. Although he said some rather laughable things, this was actually one of the wisest things he ever said.

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In this election campaign, there are also things we know and things that we don’t know.

We know that Tony Abbott has been demanding an election every day for the whole three years since the last one.

We know that for all that time, he has insisted that the coalition has a boatload of policies and costings waiting to be released as soon as the election is called.

We knew that the election would have to be called for some time before the end of November this year.

We know that Tony Abbott knew this.  Wait, scratch that.  That’s actually my assumption that he knew it.  It should be a pretty fair assumption, but it’s an assumption nonetheless.

We know that the Coalition’s ‘Real Solutions’ document has a starbust saying “Fully Costed” on almost every other page.

We know that the election date has been announced for Saturday 7th September.

Putting together all of the above, we know that we now have the conditions under which Mr Abbott said he would release his policies and costings.

And we know that in the first debate last night, a full week after the election was called and with less than four weeks until polling day, when pressed on the costings of his policies, Mr Abbott said,

“You will see in good time before polling day exactly how much we're going to spend and exactly how much we’re going to save and exactly how much better the bank balance will be under the Coalition than under the Labor Party.”

This seems like a funny definition of “in good time” for someone who has spent three years demanding an election next week and who has given the impression that all the details have been sorted out and they were just waiting for an election date to release it all.  What we don’t know is what would have happened if there had been an election a year earlier.

What we don’t know is what on earth “in good time” means.

Of course, 5pm on September 6th is technically before polling day.  You just have to ask yourself, to use Mr Abbott’s own words, who is fair dinkum?

Vote for whoever you want.